In today's telecommunications, digital networks transport large amounts of information. Network services can be, for example, traditional voice phone, facsimile, television, audio and video broadcast, and data transfer.
With the increasing need of information exchange in the global society, the capacity of existing and future networks must be used efficiently. Multiplexers switch different network services to a single network in such a way that every service is fully maintained and does not disturb other services.
Communication integrated circuits use various techniques, such as time division multiplexing (TDM) to transmit information from multiple communication channels over a single communication line. Exemplary communication integrated circuits and TDM methods are illustrated in U.S. Pat. No. 6,771,630 of Weitz et al., and U.S. Pat. No. 6,167,059 of Hagai et al., both being incorporated herein by reference.
One disadvantage of TDM transmission is that an error in a transmission of channel information of a single communication channel can disrupt the transmission of channel information of other communication channels that share the same communication line. An under-run occurs when a certain communication channel does not have enough (or any) channel information to transmit during a time slot that is allocated for transmission of channel information from that certain communication channel.
An under-run can cause the transmission of channel information from multiple communication channels that share the same communication line to halt and data to be discarded. This unwanted result can occur from a failure of clock recovery and/or data recovery failures.
There is a need to provide efficient methods for managing under-runs as well as efficient devices having under-run management capabilities.